Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a system and method to manage communication sessions in an enterprise and particularly to a system and method for managing multi-modal communication sessions in an enterprise.
Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service, inbound and outbound contacts or customers. A primary objective of contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency usage of its available resources. The contact center efficiency is generally measured by metrics such as Service Level Agreement (‘SLA’), Customer Satisfaction (‘CSAT’), and match rate. Contact center resources may include, agents, communication assets (e.g., number of voice trunks, number and bandwidth of video trunks, etc.), computing resources (e.g., a speed, a queue length, a storage space, etc.), and so forth.
Service level is one measurement of the contact center efficiency. Service level is typically determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted within a specified period by the number accepted plus number that were not accepted, but completed in some other way (e.g., abandoned, given busy, canceled, flowed out). Service level definitions may vary from one enterprise to another.
Match rate is another indicator used in measuring the contact center efficiency. Match rate is usually determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted by a primary skill level agent within a period of time by the number of contacts accepted by any agent in a queue over the same period. An agent with a primary skill level is one who typically may handle contacts of a certain nature more effectively and/or efficiently as compared to an agent of lesser skill level. There are other contact center agents who may not be as proficient as the primary skill level agent, and those agents are identified either as skill level agents or backup skill level agents. As can be appreciated, contacts received by a primary skill level agent are typically handled more quickly and accurately or effectively (e.g., higher revenue attained) than a contact received by a secondary or even backup skill level agent. Thus, it is an objective of most contact centers to optimize match rate along with the service level.
In addition to service level and match rate performance measures, contact centers use other Key Performance Indicators (‘KPIs’), such as revenue, estimated, actual, or predicted wait time, average speed of answer, throughput, resource utilization, resource performance, resource responsiveness and the like, to calculate performance relative to their Service Level Agreements (‘SLAs’). Operational efficiency is achieved when the KPIs are managed near, but not above, SLA threshold levels.
Throughput is a measure of the number of contacts/contact requests or communication sessions that may be processed in a given amount of time. Resource utilization is a measure of how efficiently the resources' time is being used. Customer service level is a measure of the time customers spend waiting for their work to be handled. Company contact center customers wish to provide service to as many requests as possible in a given amount of time, using the least number of resources to do so, and minimizing the wait time for their customers.
Typically, when a new contact arrives into a contact center, a most suitable agent to provide services is selected by the contact center. However, all agents are not at same level within the contact center. Some of the agents of the contact center are very skilled agents, also called as gold rated agents, but some of the agents are not very skilled, but having some minimum skills, also called silver rated agents. Hence, it is necessary to monitor communication sessions managed by agents, such as silver rated agents in order to maintain the business goals. These communication sessions are monitored by supervisors of the contact center. The supervisor is allowed to listen to a conversation between a customer and an agent on an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), monitor textual conversation going back and forth on a web chat session, or pre-approve an agent's response emails before communicating to customers, to name a few examples. However, most of the communication sessions are multi-modal communication sessions.
Multi-modal communication sessions are communication sessions in which customers and agents are already in communicating with each other, for example, a voice communication session, a video communication session, a web chat communication sessions, etc., and the customer and agent further desire to add a new communication within the communication session. For example, an agent is on a web chat with a customer, and a cellphone voice communication is added. Then a co-browse communication, and then a WebRTC communication is added along with the initial web chat session between the customer and the agent.
Traditional monitoring techniques are modality centric, for example, how a particular modality is managed by an agent, and therefore, the efficient monitoring of different communication modalities added to a communication session becomes difficult. Further, the supervisor can monitor only an initial communication associated with a communication session and when another communication is added within the communication session then the supervisor has to manually figure out which communication is associated with the communication session, which is a time consuming and cumbersome process.
There is thus a need for a system and method for managing multi-modal communication sessions in an enterprise in a more efficient manner.